The Sages say truly
That two animals are in this forest:
One glorious, beautiful, and swift,
A great and strong deer;
The other an unicorn.
[..]
He that knows how to tame and master them by Art,
To couple them together,
And to lead them in and out of the forest,
May justly be called a Master.
For we rightly judge
That he has attained the golden flesh,
And may triumph everywhere;
Nay, he may bear rule over great Augustus.

The Book Of Lambspring

To anyone paying attention, it should be obvious that the inverted moral value (vice) of infidelity that is actively and very profitablypromoted in the half light of public consciousness, in adultery-themed “dating” sites, apps, and “reality”TV, is now being actively normalised by mainstream media, along with ‘liberal’ academia.

This “normalisation” of cheating has exactly the same root as the accounting, banking, and money systems.

As we have seen recently, the first step in an alchemical experiment is called nigredo (“blackening”; a synonym for corruption, decay, sacrifice, death, negation).

In double entry bookkeeping, the foundation of the accounting, banking, and money systems, the first rule is also an act of negation:

For every debit there must be an equal credit, and for every credit there must be an equal debit.

In Cabala, the first act of creation by “Ein-Sof” (Infinite God) is said to be an act of self-negation (“tzimtzum”; contraction, concealment).

In mainstream “financial intermediation” theory of banking, the first principle is a pretence of self-negation: supposedly, the mere coupling together of two opposites, Savers and Borrowers.

This “normalisation” of cheating – a direct attack on the cornerstone social bonds of traditional marriage and family – aims to bring about the corruption – and destruction – of human society.

Or, as the “philosophers” of the “royal Art” prefer to frame it, the “transformation” of human society.

The first step in the “experiment”, is the decay, destruction, or negation, of traditional moral values. Only then can the alchemist bring forth “gold” from the “base”; the “higher”, from the “lower”; Order, out of Chaos.

“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”

“You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

It should not be necessary to spell out the myriad economic impacts of broken marriages, and broken homes, inclining “preferences” toward an increased “demand” (need) for debt: the Usurocracy’s exclusive monopoly “product”.

One can only wonder at the magnitude of economic inefficiencies – and wealth inequality – associated with the increased “need” to pay billions in fees to the “family” lawyer class, for example.

I would like to draw public attention to the alchemical symbolism evidencing this once covert, and now increasingly overt goal, of normalising infidelity – that is to say, lying and cheating.

In previousessays we have seen that the ancient “Art” of alchemy is an andocentric, misogynous, predatory sex magic system, whose hidden goal is the theft, manipulation, and domination, of the feminine birth-force (life, “growth”) energy, or “gynergy”.

For power and profit.

Throughout recorded history, alchemical adepts have advanced their deception by combining exoteric (outer) and esoteric (inner) doctrines, with the difference between the two cloaked in metaphor, allegory and symbolism – in particular, by means of the rebus (Latin rēbus “by means of objects”) or punning principle – thus hiding the truth in plain sight:

The Rebis (from Latin res bina, meaning dual or double matter) is the end product of the alchemical magnum opus or great work.

As we have also seen, the alchemical “Art” is based on two philosophical principles: the Unity of Opposites (exoteric), and the Law of Inversion (esoteric).

The “profane” are gulled – enchanted – by the outward appearance of beauty, nobility and virtue. Only the “illuminated” understand that the appearance cloaks a diabolic inner doctrine of inversion, that is explicitly contra naturam.

To illustrate this, let us now consider the alchemical allegory of the Stag and the Unicorn, from the Book of [Abraham] Lambspring (Frankfurt, 1625):

It seems that this little book was first published under the title De Lapide Philosophico Triga Chemicum (Prague 1599) compiled by the Frenchman Nicolas Barnaud prominent in the alchemical circles around Rudolf II.

Appearing at face value to be a work of “spiritual” alchemy, “[i]ts verses point to the soul and spirit involved in the alchemical transformation and its fifteen emblems are evocative symbols of these inner processes.”

The parable of the “deer” and the Unicorn appears to explain that the forest is “the Body”, the deer is “the Soul” , and the unicorn “the Spirit”. Knowing how to master all three “by Art” appears to be the goal aspired to.

The tinctures in alchemy relate also to the substances of the Mass, the red wine, the blood, and the white wafer, the body of Christ. Administration of the Sacraments was seen as spiritualising the souls of the partakers. In alchemical terms these white and red stones or tinctures served much the same purpose, though the alchemists achieved this, not through the intermediacy of a priest but by their own inner work of transmutation. Here alchemy links directly with the Grail stories which use similar parallels between the Grail and the Sacraments. The red tincture was occasionally symbolised by a stag bearing antlers. The stag being seen as a noble masculine animal. This links in with the Unicorn as a symbol of the white or feminine tincture. In some alchemical illustrations, such as that of the late 16th century Book of Lambspring, the Stag and Unicorn meet in the forest of the soul as part of the process of inner transformation.

We have already learned, however, that the secret inner doctrine of alchemy is one of sexual magic, and that the inversion (or reversal) of values lies at its heart.

The Stag as a symbol is often associated with the Sun [Sola ☉, Mars ♂, Asset, active, creditor] and the Unicorn is usually linked with the Moon [Luna ☽, Venus ♀, Liability, passive, debtor]. These polarities are to be coupled together through the alchemist’s work.

Seen in this hidden ‘light’ – from the “other side” of the Sun or “Black Sun” – the parable of the Stag and the Unicorn is actually a metaphor for the infidelity and promiscuity (Latin infidēlitas: unfaithful, disloyal, treacherous) that is essential to the alchemists’ sex magic rituals; where, in the act of “coupl[ing] them together”, the initiated adept uses a cunning trick (upaya, method) to steal the seed of the woman for his own empowerment, and enrichment:

He that knows how to tame and master them by Art,
To couple them together,
And to lead them in and out of the forest,
May justly be called a Master.

Rather than the “deer” representing nobility of the Soul, for the alchemical adept it represents the rutting Stag’s “active” (creditor) sexual activity with all the females (debtor) in the herd.

stag (n.)
late 12c., probably from Old English stagga “a stag,” from Proto-Germanic *stag-, from PIE root *stegh- “to stick, prick, sting.” The Old Norse equivalent was used of male foxes, tomcats, and dragons; and the Germanic root word perhaps originally meant “male animal in its prime.”

Adjectival meaning “pertaining to or composed of males only” (as in stag party) is American English slang from 1848. Compare bull-dance, slang for one performed by men only (1845); gander (n.) also was used in the same sense. Stag film “pornographic movie” is attested from 1968. Stag beetle, so called for its “horns,” is from 1680s.

Rather than the Unicorn representing the Spirit, for the initiated it represents a cynical mockery of what is to him a mythical creature – the chaste and faithful female; symbolic also of the Holy Spirit, the Wisdom of God, the Virgin Mary, and the Christian saint.

Herodotus, a Greek historian who lived c. 490 to 425 BC, wrote that “the foulest Babylonian custom” was the practice of sacred prostitution. Once in their lifetimes, all women were required to sit in the temple of Ishtar/Inanna (“Aphrodite” to the greek Herodotus) and “have intercourse with some stranger” in return for money which was given to the temple:

Once a woman has taken her place there, she does not go away to her home before some stranger has cast money into her lap, and had intercourse with her outside the temple; but while he casts the money, he must say, “I invite you in the name of Mylitta” (that is the Assyrian name for Aphrodite). It does not matter what sum the money is; the woman will never refuse, for that would be a sin, the money being by this act made sacred. So she follows the first man who casts it and rejects no one. [..] So then the women that are fair and tall are soon free to depart, but the uncomely have long to wait because they cannot fulfill the law; for some of them remain for three years, or four.

It is noteworthy that “a fraction of female gender researchers” dispute Herodotus’ account, claiming that the entire notion began with a few “patriarchal” Greek writers concocting defamatory tales about cultural or political enemies.

What is of importance is that the existence of “holy prostitution” in Babylon has been the widely-held belief, for thousands of years. Given this accepted milieu then, it is little wonder that the adepts of “Hermes, the Sage, the Babylonian” are seen in alchemical texts referring to the “base” subjects of their experiments as “whores”, and in at least one instance, as “the Babylonian whore”.

The final four verses of the parable clearly allude to what is the true goal of the alchemist: the attainment of “golden flesh”, that he may “triumph everywhere” and “rule over great Augustus” (the first Roman emperor).

[T]he “Alchemy of life: he can make his life last as long as the sun and moon[; the] Alchemy of body: he can make his body eternally be but sixteen years old[; and the] Alchemy of enjoyments: he can turn iron and copper into gold”. These three experiments, then, primarily concern two goals: firstly the attainment of immortality, and secondly the production of gold, that is, material wealth.

I would draw your attention to two further points of special interest, before leaving you to contemplate the entire parable for yourself.

Firstly, bear in mind that the exoteric (public) doctrine actively promotes the idea of “equality” of the two “universal” genders. Then observe the subtle, egocentric misogyny implied by the lyrical praise of the Male (“glorious, beautiful and swift”, “great and strong”, etc), sharply contrasted by the absence of any adjectives, much less any superlatives, applied to the Female. One might get the impression (“The other an unicorn”) that the Female is merely an afterthought, barely worth mentioning at all.

Secondly, observe that the Stag is depicted as proudly boasting six (6) tines on each of its antlers, and bear in mind that a stag’s antlers function as objects of sexual attraction, and as weapons in fights for control over harems.

The Book of Lambspring,
A Noble Ancient Philosopher,
Concerning the Philosophical Stone;
Rendered into Latin Verse by
Nicholas Barnaud Delphinas,
Doctor of Medicine, a zealous Student of this Art.

Figure III

HEAR WITHOUT TERROR THAT IN THE FOREST ARE HIDDEN A DEER AND AN UNICORN

The Sages say truly
That two animals are in this forest:
One glorious, beautiful, and swift,
A great and strong deer;
The other an unicorn.
They are concealed in the forest,
But happy shall that man be called
Who shall snare and capture them.
The Masters shew you here clearly
That in all places
These two animals wander about in forests
(But know that the forest is but one).
If we apply the parable to our Art,
We shall call the forest the Body.
That will be rightly and truly said.
The unicorn will be the Spirit at all times.
The deer desires no other name
But that of the Soul; which name no man shall take away from it.
He that knows how to tame and master them by Art,
To couple them together,
And to lead them in and out of the forest,
May justly be called a Master.
For we rightly judge
That he has attained the golden flesh,
And may triumph everywhere;
Nay, he may bear rule over great Augustus.

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”

– St. Augustine, City of God

Writing at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine both revolutionized and brought to a close antiquity’s idea of freedom. A man was not a slave by nature or by law, as Aristotle claimed. His freedom was a function of his moral state. A man had as many masters as he had vices. This insight would provide the basis for the most sophisticated form of social control known to man.

Fourteen hundred years later, a decadent French aristocrat turned that tradition on its head when he wrote that “the freest of people are they who are most friendly to murder.” Like St. Augustine, the Marquis de Sade would agree that freedom was a function of morals. Unlike St. Augustine, Sade proposed a revolution in sexual morals to accompany the political revolution then taking place in France. Libido Dominandi – the term is taken from Book I of Augustine’s City of God – is the definitive history of that sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.

Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that “as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of technologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control – including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail – allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine’s insight on its head and create masters out of men’s vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.

*******

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:

But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

– Jesus of Nazareth (Sermon on the Mount; Matthew 5:27-28)

*******

* Credit for the term “Usurocracy” goes to Dr John Dunn, author of Renaissance: Counter Renaissance

Debunking the “Unspeakable” Name of “G-d”

“Before I step down from this glorious podium I ask you—scratch that, I implore you—not to forget the one tool we have been instilled with; the mother of all tools, the power grip of global business, of influence, and of the ability to do good in the world. We have constantly referred to this tool as the power of 72.”

— Oren Heiman, graduation speech before the 72 graduating members of the Global Executive MBA program of Columbia Business School and London Business School, January 20121

יהוה The Tetragrammaton

What, then, was the meaning of this mysterious term? It was the name of the four primitive letters of the mothertongue: the Jod, symbol of the vine, or paternal sceptre of Noah; the HE, type of the cup of libations and also of maternity; the VAU, which joins the two, and was depicted in India by the great and mysterious lingam. Such was the triple sign of the triad in the divine word; then the mother letter appeared a second time to express the fecundity of nature and woman.. (…) Moreover, the sacred word was not pronounced; it was spelt, and read off in four words, which are the four sacred words JOD HE VAU HE.2

According to the kabbalist ten is the number of matter, of which the special sign is zero; in the tree of the sephiroth ten represents Malchuth, or exterior and material substance; the sin of Adam is therefore materialism, and the fruit which he plucks from the tree represents flesh isolated from spirit, zero separated from unity, the schism of the number ten, giving on the one side a despoiled unity and on the other nothingness and death.3

As a fact, a strong and determined will can arrive in a short time at absolute independence, and we are all in possession of the chemical instrument, the great and sole athanor which answers for the separation of the subtle from the gross and the fixed from the volatile. This instrument, complete as the world and precise as mathematics, is represented by the sages under the emblem of the pentagram or five-pointed star, which is the absolute sign of human intelligence.4

The number five is that of the soul, typified by the quintessence which results from the equilibrium of the four elements; in the Tarot this number is represented by the high-priest or spiritual autocrat, type of the human will, that high-priestess who alone decides our eternal destinies.5

The number six represents the antagonism of the two triads, that is, absolute negation and absolute affirmation. It is therefore the number of toil and liberty…6

“The rich rule over the poor,
and the borrower is servant to the lender.”

— Proverbs of Solomon 22:7

Rule of 72

The rule of 72 is a shortcut to estimate the number of years required to double your money at a given annual rate of return. The rule states that you divide the rate, expressed as a percentage, into 72:

The Seventy-two Lettered Name

Of the names of God in the Old Testament, that which occurs most frequently (6,823 times) is the so-called Tetragrammaton, Yhwh (יהוה), the distinctive personal name of the God of Israel.

The Seventy-two-Lettered Name is derived from three verses in Exodus (xiv. 19-21) beginning with “Wayyissa’,” “Wayyabo,” “Wayyeṭ,” respectively.8

With the Tetragrammaton must be included the names of God formed of twelve, forty-two, and seventy-two letters respectively, which are important factors in Jewish mysticism (Ḳid. 71a et passim). They have, according to tradition, a magical effect; for mysticism and magic are everywhere allied. These great names are closely akin to the long series of vowels in the magic papyri, and are obtained by anagrammatic combinations of the effective elements of the Tetragrammaton. The simplest way of determining these three names is to form a magic triangle…9

The Tetractys

The Greek word signifies, literally, the number four, and is therefore synonymous with the quaternion; but it has been peculiarly applied to a symbol of the Pythagoreans, which is composed of ten dots arranged in a triangular form of four rows.

This figure was in itself, as a whole, emblematic of the Tetragrammaton, or sacred name of four letters, for tetractys, in Greek, means Four, and was undoubtedly learned by Pythagoras during his visit to Babylon. But the parts of which it is composed were also pregnant symbols. Thus the one point was a symbol of the [male, phallic △] Active Principle or Creator, the two points of the [female, vulva ▽] Passive Principle or Matter, the three of the world proceeding from their union, and the four of the liberal arts and sciences, which may be said to complete and perfect that world.10

By arranging the four letters of the Great Name, יהוה, (I H V H), in the form of the Pythagorean Tetractys, the 72 powers of the Great Name of God are manifested.11

Abraxas is symbolic of five creatures, and as the circle of the year actually consists of 360 degrees, each of the emanating deities is one-fifth of this power, or 72, one of the most sacred numbers in the Old Testament of the Jews and in their Qabbalistic system.12

Diagram of the Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton arranged in a Tetractys shape, showing that by the rules of Gematria the sum is 72. From diagram by German Hebraist/Cabalist Johannes Reuchlin. (Source: Wikipedia)

The Cosmic Rose

Engraving pictured in “Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae” by Heinrich Khunrath (1595). The triangle near the top contains a tetractys of the Tetragrammaton. (Source: Wikipedia)

SIGNO VINCES IN HOC – “In this sign you will conquer”. (cf. Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry)

Nashak

נָשַׁךְ nâshak, naw-shak’; a primitive root; to strike with a sting (as a serpent); figuratively, to oppress with interest on a loan:—bite, lend upon usury.13

The World (XXI) is a trump or Major Arcana card in the tarot deck. It is usually the final card of the Major Arcana or tarot trump sequence.14

..the significance of the objects of the Hebrew cultus is for the first time comprehensible. Who does not perceive in the golden table, crowned and supported by cherubim, which covered the ark of the covenant, the same symbols as those of the twenty-first Tarot key? The ark was a hieroglyphical synthesis of the whole kabbalistic dogma; it included the jod or blossoming staff of Aaron, the he, or cup, the gomor containing the manna, the two tables of the law an analogous symbol to that of the sword of justice and the manna kept in the gomor, four objects which interpret wonderfully the letters of the divine tetragram.15

But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The key word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. (…) Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. (…) It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating.16

The inversion of values can be traced back to the ancient Semitic empires of Mesopotamia, and the fertility cult worship of Inanna-Ishtar, goddess of Sex and War, the “Queen of Heaven”:

Central to the goddess as paradox is her well-attested psychological and more rarely evidenced physiological androgyny. Inanna-Ishtar is both female and male. Over and over again the texts juxtapose the masculine and feminine traits and behavior of the goddess.1

Her androgyny (also) manifests itself ritually in the transvestism of her cultic personnel. The awesome power of the goddess shows itself in the shattering of the human boundary between the sexes: “She (Ishtar) [changes] the right side (male) into the left side (female), she [changes] the left side into the right side, she [turns] a man into a woman, she [turns] a woman into a man, she ador[ns] a man as a woman, she ador[ns] a woman as a man.”2

The most vivid expressions of the goddess’s innate contradictions appear in the following passage:

To destroy, to build up, to tear up and to settle are yours, Inanna….To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna….
Business, great winning, financial loss, deficit are yours, Inanna….3

Inanna-Ishtar’s cultic celebrations and cultic personnel above all reflect her anomalousness and liminality. She is, one might say, externalized into unordered, carnivalesque celebration that demonstrates a reaching beyond the normal order of things and the breakdown of norms. The goddess’s festivals are institutionalized license. They celebrate and tolerate disorder. They are occasions when social rules are in abeyance and deviance from norms is articulated. Through symbolic inversion they attack the basic categorical differences between male and female, human and animal, young and old.4

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in them both, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it (…) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality.”

— George Orwell, defining “doublethink”, 1984

Within a few centuries, the new capitalist spirit challenged the basic Christian ethic: the boundless ego of Sir Gales Overreach and his fellows in the marketplace had no room for charity or love in any of their ancient senses. The capitalist scheme of values in fact transformed five of the seven deadly sins of Christianity – pride, envy, greed, avarice, and lust – into positive social virtues, treating them as necessary incentives to all economic enterprise; while the cardinal virtues, beginning with love and humility, were rejected as ‘bad for business,’ except in the degree that they made the working class more docile and more amenable to cold-blooded exploitation.5

— Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine

“Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures. Society is now required not only to recognise everyone’s right to the freedom of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite in meaning. This destruction of traditional values from above not only leads to negative consequences for society, but is also essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority, which does not accept the changes occurring or the proposed revision of values.”

* “And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.
He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.
And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.”

On Double-Entry Bookkeeping, Money Creation, Sexual Alchemy, and the Magickal Inversion of Values

“In vulgar opinion, transmutations and metamorphoses have always been the very essence of magic. Now, the crowd, being the echo of opinion, which is queen of the world, is never perfectly right nor entirely wrong. Magic really changes the nature of things, or, rather, modifies their appearances at pleasure, according to the strength of the operator’s will … Speech creates its form, and when a person, held infallible, confers a name upon a given thing, he really transforms that thing into the substance signified by the name. The masterpiece of speech and of faith, in this order, is the real transmutation of a substance without change in its appearances.”1

– Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, 1896

“In case you thought banks lend money—they take deposits and lend money—you’re wrong. Legally, they do not take deposits, they borrow from the public. The expressions in banking are designed to mislead what’s really happening. What does a bank do? Banks purchase securities .. and they don’t pay up.”

It is often said that “the devil is in the detail”. We commonly understand this to mean that hidden somewhere there is a catch or mysterious element. It serves as a warning to pay close attention in order to avoid error… or entrapment.

When we consider the grand mystical numberland of banking and finance today, with its infinitely labyrinthine mountains of multi-layered financial derivatives—allegedly ‘monetary’ instruments bearing incomprehensible acronyms, innumerable interconnections, and indecipherable obligations—one might be forgiven for believing that the devil and his minions really does now rule the world.

So it is both interesting and ironic that this idiom is itself a derivative—and an inversion—of an earlier saying.

“Le bon Dieu est dans le détail” (“the good God is in the detail”)2 means that attention paid to small things has big rewards. It serves as an encouragement to be conscientious in one’s work; that whatever one does, it should be done thoroughly, with an eye to how “the good God” will judge it.

There, we traced the history of el modo vinegia (“the Venetian method”) of double-entry bookkeeping, and unveiled the abundant evidence for its true purpose.

Contrary to popular belief, it was not developed as a dry, moral values-free, coolly rational mathematical tool of accounting and practical commerce. It was, rather, a Hermetic-Kabbalist ‘magick’ method for a very different kind of calculation – the deliberate, willful concealment of the immoral (and at the time, illegal) practice of lending money for gain (usury).

We also demonstrated that the method, both of double-entry bookkeeping, and of bank ‘money’ (credit) creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”), is precisely represented by the Hermetic-Kabbalist alchemical symbol of the hexagram:

However, in one small detail, the above diagram has never appeared to me to be perfectly consistent with 19th century French occult magus Eliphas Lévi’s “Double Triangle of Solomon”, as referenced in my essay:

Lévi tells us that “(t)he notion of the infinite and the absolute is expressed by this sign … the most simple and complete abridgment of the science of all things”3:

The Double Triangle of Solomon, represented by the two Ancients of the Kabbalah; the Macroprosopus and the Microprosopus; the God of Light and the God of Reflections; mercy and vengeance; the white Jehovah and the black Jehovah.4

Specifically, the detail that has long troubled me is the two little symbols (and their inverses) in Lévi’s sign, representing inter alia the Hermetic-Kabbalist alchemical axiom, “As above, so below”5:

As you can see, that which is Above does not appear to be the same as that which is Below – that is to say, in the very particular sense of there not appearing to be two different pairs of opposing (inverse) identities on the Left hand side versus the Right hand side, as depicted in Lévi’s “Great Seal”.

Note carefully that the word values (meanings) do not appear to match – even though their numerical values do, as indeed they must (remember the fundamental rule of double-entry bookkeeping – “For every credit there must be a matching debit”):

The apparent inconsistency is easily resolved, however, by a closer consideration of Lévi’s magnum opus, with particular attention to the importance of language—and especially of speech—in ritual magick (italicised and bold emphasis added):

Grammar itself attributes three persons to the verb. The first is that which speaks, the second that which is spoken to, and the third the object. .. The magical dogma is also one in three and three in one. That which is above is like or equal to that which is below. Thus, two things which resemble one another and the word which signifies their resemblance make three.7

What is the word that signifies the “resemblance” of the symbols and their inverses?

What is the word that defines not the form but the substance of the so-called ‘Asset’ and ‘Liability’—words that appear to be contradictory—as employed in the process of bank ‘money’ creation?

Interestingly, the correct word is itself a triadic word; one in three and three in one.

Promise-to-Pay.

Or, to use the correct legal term employed by the ‘money’ creators, a Promissory Note (ie, promise-ory). In layman’s terms, an I-Owe-You (“IOU”).

If you have read my earlier essay, you will recall that we went through the double entry process step by step, demonstrating that it is precisely represented by the Double Triangle of Solomon.

Let us review that process symbolically once again, but this time, with a more precise, and complete word definition included. That is to say, we will now include the triadic word (“IOU”) that signifies the unity of the “two things which resemble one another”—the two apparent opposites—that are being created. We will also include the word that signifies the identity of the person issuing the IOU.

When you go to the bank to borrow money, the first critical step is the forming of an agreement – the loan contract:

The contract says, in essence, that the bank promises-to-pay (IOU) a number of Dollars, Euros, or Pounds (the “principal” of the loan), in exchange for your promise-to-pay (IOU) the bank the same (“principal”) number of Dollars, Euros or Pounds back again …

… plus “interest” (usury):

From your perspective as the borrower, on the one (right) hand your IOU to the bank is your Liability – you are going to have to discharge that liability, by paying the bank in future. On the other (left) hand, the bank’s IOU to you is your Asset – when the bank discharges its liability to you, you will have ‘money’ to spend:

Likewise, from the bank’s perspective, their IOU to you is their Liability, and your IOU to them is their Asset:

When the loan contract—a binding legal document—is signed by both parties, the Sacred Marriage or Divine Union between the male (phallic △) principle (the Lender), and the female (vulva ▽) principle (the Borrower) is ready to be consummated.8

It behooves one to draw attention to the obvious anthropomorphic metaphor here: the Borrower is about to get ****** by the Lender.

As we can now see, by carefully defining what is the true substance, and not just the magickal form of words used, the Above does indeed match the Below. The legal substance (an IOU) and its numerical value (the principal amount) is identical, as is the identity (person) who “owes” on either side. Only the word form (and thus, the word value, or meaning) is transformed, by inversion:

Now, consider carefully that it is the Lender (male △ identity) IOU that appears in its inverse reflections “As above, so Below” on the Left hand side, while the Borrower (female ▽ identity) IOU appears on the Right hand side.

Eliphas Lévi informs us that (bold and italicised emphasis added):

The primeval sages, when seeking the First of Causes, beheld good and evil in the world; they considered the shadow and the light; they compared winter with spring, age with youth, life with death, and their conclusion was this: The First Cause is beneficent and severe; it gives and takes away life. Then are there two contrary principles, the one good and the other evil, exclaimed the disciples of Manes. No, the two principles of universal equilibrium are not contrary, although contrasted in appearance, for a singular wisdom opposes one to another. Good is on the right, evil on the left, but the supreme excellence is above both, applying evil to the victory of good and good to the amendment of evil.9

It is apparent then, that the Hermetic-Kabbalist creators of the Venetian method of double-entry bookkeeping have also inverted the traditional correspondence of Good with the Right hand side, and Evil with the Left hand side. In double entry, the rule of law (pun meaningfully intended) is reversed – Assets (“in the black“) are shown on the Left, and Liabilities (“in the red“) on the Right:

If the stunned exclamation “Holy ****!” leapt to your lips in the watching of that video, then you might well be forgiven.

Why so?

Because you are more near to right than you know.

This formalised inversion of values can be traced back to the ancient Semitic empires of Mesopotamia, and the cult worship of Inanna-Ishtar, goddess of Love and War, the “Queen of Heaven” (all parentheses in original; bold and italicised emphasis added):

Central to the goddess as paradox is her well-attested psychological and more rarely evidenced physiological androgyny. Inanna-Ishtar is both female and male. Over and over again the texts juxtapose the masculine and feminine traits and behavior of the goddess.10

Her androgyny (also) manifests itself ritually in the transvestism of her cultic personnel. The awesome power of the goddess shows itself in the shattering of the human boundary between the sexes: “She (Ishtar) [changes] the right side (male) into the left side (female), she [changes] the left side into the right side, she [turns] a man into a woman, she [turns] a woman into a man, she ador[ns] a man as a woman, she ador[ns] a woman as a man.”11

Sjöberg… discusses the meaning of the transformation implied here. In his opinion, the passage does not suggest “a changing of the sexes when referring to the Inanna-Ishtar cult. The passages refer only to the changing roles of women and men in the cult ceremonies.” … Note the association in Mesopotamia, as elsewhere, of the left side with the female and the right side with the male. On the “pure right” hand and the “impure left” hand, see M. Civil, “Enlil and Ninlil: The Marriage of Sud”…12

Inanna-Ishtar combines male aggressiveness with the force of superabundance of female sexuality. She encompasses the two forms of potential disorder and violence—sex and war.13

The most vivid expressions of the goddess’s innate contradictions appear in the following passage:

To run, to escape, to quiet and to pacify are yours, Inanna….
To destroy, to build up, to tear up and to settle are yours, Inanna….
To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna….Business, great winning, financial loss, deficit are yours, Inanna….
Neglect, careful preparation, to raise the head and to subdue are yours, Inanna….
Slander, untruthful words, to speak inimical (words) (and) to add hostile words are yours, Inanna….
To initiate a quarrel, to joke, to cause smiling, to be base and to be important are yours, Inanna.14

Inanna-Ishtar’s cultic celebrations and cultic personnel above all reflect her anomalousness and liminality. She is, one might say, externalized into unordered, carnivalesque celebration that demonstrates a reaching beyond the normal order of things and the breakdown of norms. The goddess’s festivals are institutionalized license. They celebrate and tolerate disorder. They are occasions when social rules are in abeyance and deviance from norms is articulated. Through symbolic inversion they attack the basic categorical differences between male and female, human and animal, young and old.15

The chief participants and actors in the goddess’s cult are well known by name … Their transvestism simulated the androgyny of Inanna-Ishtar. It was perhaps the inversion of the male/female binary opposition that thereby neutralized this opposition. By emulating their goddess who was both female and male, they shattered the boundary between the sexes. … The cultic personnel of the goddess in their costumes, words, and acts had but one goal: “to delight Ishtar’s heart, give themselves up to (otherwise) for[bidden] actions.”16

The male prostitutes comb their hair before her….
They decorate the napes of their necks with colored bands….
They gird themselves with the sword belt, the “arm of battle”….
Their right side they decorate with women’s clothing….
Their left side they cover with men’s clothing….
With jump ropes and colored cords they compete before her….
…
The one who covers the sword with blood, he sprinkles blood….
He pours out blood on the dais of the throne room.16a

Returning then to our account of the monetary Sacred Marriage or Divine Union that is about to be consummated—that is, now that the all-important legal document (the loan contract) has been signed—we are about to discover that another inversion of (word) values is about to take place. This one, far more crucial. And entirely one-sided.

If you go to the bank and you borrow money you sign a loan contract – very crucial. Your signature creates the money supply. Because the bank—legally—will consider the loan contract a Promissory Note, and that’s what it’s considered legally, a Promissory Note … and the bank purchases this contract. That’s what they do; they purchase the loan contract. Now, they owe you money. You say ‘I don’t care about the mechanics, give me the money’. The banker will say, ‘We’ll put it in your account. You’ll find it in your bank account’. Well, what is a bank account? It is not a deposit. What is it? It is a record of the bank’s debt to the public; it is a record of the bank’s debt to the new borrower, and they’ll show you the record of how much money they owe you. That’s it. They don’t pay up.17

In other words, the Lender—the male (phallic △) principle—does not discharge his Sacred Marital (legal) obligation to the Borrower, the female (vulva ▽) principle.

‘Our’ monetary system is really an “Un-holy ****”.

It is an anthropomorphic metaphor for the ancient alchemical practice of coitus reservatus—an andocentric, misogynist, predatory ritual magick system for the acquisition, manipulation, transformation, and domination of the female power18 principle of fertility or fecundity (i.e., the power to create abundant new life)—applied to the realm of ‘money’ creation. The Lender chooses not to discharge his ‘essence’ (substance) or ‘seed’ (the “principal”) that he is obligated to give her, in exchange for her promise to repay him with her “firstborn” (monetary) “child”; the “first fruits” of her “labour”.

Bernard Lietaer and Rivkah Harris (respectively) explain:

Essentially, to pay back interest on a loan requires using someone else’s principal. In other words, not creating the money to pay interest is the device used to generate the scarcity necessary for a bank-debt monetary system to function. It forces people to compete with each other for money that was never created…19

Play (mēlulu) is an integral part of Inanna-Ishtar’s personality… her playground was the battleground: “Goddess of fights, let the battle proceed like the play of puppets.” .. “Ishtar, whose play is fighting.”20

Now that the Borrower has naïvely signed up for her legal obligation to him, the Lender engages in a willful act of deception; he inverts the meaning of the words used to define his own legal obligation to her.

If you will forgive a little wordplay, well might ‘our’ monetary system be called “Malice in Numberland”.

For our purposes here I have taken the liberty of excerpting from the Conclusion of the professor’s paper, and inserting the relevant tables (my bold and italicised emphasis added):

The act of signing the loan contract and purchasing it as a promissory note of the borrower without yet making the borrowed funds available to the borrower (Step 1) has the same accounting implications for banks, non-banks and non-financial corporations alike. In all cases, the balance sheets lengthen, as an asset (the loan contract) is acquired and a liability to make money available to the borrower is incurred (accounts payable).21

In Step 2, the lender makes the funds available to the borrower. The fact that in Step 2 the bank is alone among firms in showing the same total impact on assets and liabilities as everyone else at Step 1, when the money had not yet been made available to the borrower, demonstrates that the bank did not actually make any money available to the borrower. This means that the bank still has an open ‘accounts payable’ liability, as it has not in fact discharged its original liability. What banks do is to simply reclassify their accounts payable items arising from the act of lending as ‘customer deposits’, and the general public, when receiving payment in the form of a transfer of bank deposits, believes that a form of money had been paid into the bank. As a result, the public readily accepts such ‘bank deposits’ and their ‘transfers’ to defray payments. They are also the main component of the official ‘money supply’ as announced by central banks (M1, M2, M3, M4), which is created almost entirely through this act of re-classifying banks’ accounts payable as fictitious ‘customer deposits’.22

This one-sided inversion of (word) values appears like this when depicted in its Hermetic-Kabbalist symbolic form:

As you can see, the ‘money’-Lender sex magicians—for all practical intents and purposes—transform their own Liability (“AC Payable”) into a fictitious “Client Deposit” (that is, as seen by the Borrower), through the power of authoritative opinion, repeated ad infinitum.

In vulgar opinion, transmutations and metamorphoses have always been the very essence of magic. Now, the crowd, being the echo of opinion, which is queen of the world, is never perfectly right nor entirely wrong. Magic really changes the nature of things, or, rather, modifies their appearances at pleasure, according to the strength of the operator’s will … Speech creates its form, and when a person, held infallible, confers a name upon a given thing, he really transforms that thing into the substance signified by the name. The masterpiece of speech and of faith, in this order, is the real transmutation of a substance without change in its appearances.

This magick power of speech to create form, and to (apparently) transform the substance of a thing simply by conferring a (different) name on it, is only the more pertinent in light of the recent release of the Panama Papers, allegedly containing evidence of tax avoidance (both legal, and illegal) practiced by wealthy individuals and public officials, through their lawyers and accountants, via offshore company entities.

How so?

In yet another inversion of word values (meaning), there is a formal accounting principle called “Substance over form” that enables precisely the kinds of legal obfuscation adopted by these individuals in moving their wealth offshore … and that banks perform in the magickal transformation of their “accounts payable” obligations (bold and italicised emphasis added):

Substance over form is an accounting principle which recognizes that business transactions should be accounted in accordance with their (economic) substance instead of their (legal) form. Economic substance refers to the underlying economic or commercial purpose of a business transaction apart from its legal or tax considerations. Legal form refers to interpretation of a business transaction in accordance with the applicable business laws.

While accounting for business transactions and other events, substance over form principle requires accountants to measure and present the economic impact of an event instead of its legal form. …

Substance over form principle is recognized by all major financial reporting frameworks, namely the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and US GAAP, etc. External auditors are required to attest that companies recognize all business transactions in compliance with the substance over form concept.23

In accounting then, the legal definition of a transaction is not considered its substance; it is now only its form, is open to interpretation, and, most importantly, is to be considered only apart from and secondary to the (claimed) “purpose”. The ‘substance’ will now be whatever the accountant (or banker) claims the purpose of the transaction to be.

Since the economic purpose of a bank’s “accounts payable” item is to provide the customer with ‘money’, then according to this barefaced inversion of logic, reason, and morality, it is standard accounting practice for the bank to re-enter (transform) and record its “accounts payable” item as a “customer deposit”, even though the true substance of that item remains, both legally, and from the bank’s own perspective, a Liability (IOU) of the bank!

As we saw in my previous essay, the Venetian method of double-entry bookkeeping was developed as a tool for the deliberate concealment of illegal (and immoral) practices. So perhaps the “substance over form” example of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) should come as no great surprise.

It is important not to lose sight of the fact that it is not only through the speech of an authority “held infallible” that such a transformation becomes ‘real’ – it is also through the ceaseless repetition of those magick words over generations.

Eliphas Lévi explains (italicised emphasis added):

Had Apollonius [of Tyana] offered a cup of wine to his disciples, and said to them: “This is my blood, of which ye shall drink henceforth to perpetuate my life within you;” and had his disciples through centuries believed that they continued the transformation by repeating the same words; had they taken the wine, despite its odour and taste, for the real, human, and living blood of Apollonius, we should have to acknowledge this master in theurgy as the most accomplished of enchanters and most potent of all the magi. It would remain for us then to adore him.24

M. de Montalembert seriously relates, in his legend of St Elizabeth of Hungary, how one day this saintly lady, surprised by her noble husband, from whom she sought to conceal her good works, in the act of carrying bread to the poor in her apron, told him that she was carrying roses, and it proved on investigation that she had spoken truly; the loaves had been changed into roses. This story is a most gracious magical apologue, and signifies that the truly wise man cannot lie, that the word of wisdom determines the form of things, or even their substance independently of their forms. Why, for example, should not the noble spouse of St Elizabeth, a good and firm Christian like herself, and believing implicitly in the real presence of the Saviour in true human body upon an altar where he beheld only a wheaten host, why should he not believe in the real presence of roses in his wife’s apron under the appearances of bread? She exhibited him loaves undoubtedly, but as she had said that they were roses, and as he believed her incapable of the smallest falsehood, he saw and wished to see roses only. This is the secret of the miracle.25

Let us indulge ourselves in a small act of transformation of our own, replacing the forms and identities in the words of Lévi’s tale with those of our present subject:

Why, for example, should not the noble client of St Goldman, a good and firm Christian like himself … why should she not believe in the real presence of money in her bank account under the appearances of a promissory record? He exhibited her a record of the promise undoubtedly, but as he had said that it was money, and as she believed him incapable of the smallest falsehood, she saw and wished to see money only. This is the secret of the miracle.

What all this means of course, is that for several hundreds of years (yes, literally), we have all like sheep been led astray.

That is to say, we have been led to believe a lie.

All of the ‘money’ that we believe ourselves to own, and that we circulate daily among ourselves in payment for goods, services, and investments, is neither ‘money’ in true substance, nor are we the owners of it.

The reality of the system is this. Bankers create IOUs out of nothing. These digital tokens represent our IOU to the bank. Then—by a clever accounting trick—they let us borrow their IOUs as ‘money’.

Begging the question – why don’t we all do the same thing, and just lend to ourselves?*

It also begs the question of how it is that the ‘money’ magicians have been able to perpetuate this colossal deception for so long, without being discovered and called to account.

Eliphas Lévi explains:

To become invisible one of three things is necessary—the interposition of some opaque medium between the light and our body, or between our body and the eyes of the spectators, or the fascination of the eyes of the spectators in such a manner that they cannot make use of their sight. Of these methods, the third only is magical. Have we not all of us observed that under the government of a strong preoccupation we look without seeing and hurt ourselves against objects in front of us?26

The secret of invisibility, therefore, wholly consists in a power which is capable of definition—that of distracting or paralysing attention, so that the light reaches the visual organ without impressing the eye of the soul. To exercise this power we must possess a will accustomed to sudden and energetic actions, great presence of mind, and skill no less great in causing diversions among the crowd. Let a man, for example, who is being pursued by his intending murderers, dart into a side street, return immediately, and advance with perfect calmness towards his pursuers, or let him mix with them and seem to be engaged in the chase, and he will certainly make himself invisible. A priest who was being hunted in ’93, with the intention of hanging him from a lamp-post, fled down a side street, assumed a stooping gait, and leaned against a corner, with an intensely preoccupied expression; the crowd of his enemies swept past; not one saw him, or, rather, it never struck anyone to recognise him; it was so unlikely to be he!27

There are a variety of words and phrases that come to mind as being apropos to describe this phenomenon.

* You may be interested to discover an alternate currency ecosystem concept of my own design, that can enable everyone to do this – to be their own central banker. Visit deror.org

*****

ADDENDUM:

I am presently writing a book on the thesis outlined in this, and my earlier essay. As we have seen, the core concepts are traceable right back to the ancient Semitic cult worship of Inanna-Ishtar, the “Queen of Heaven”. Of particular interest is the evidences for widespread regional use of magickal talismans and erotic plaques placed at thresholds (eg, doorways, windows) to sexually attract and “bind” prosperity demons:

Source: Sex, Magic, and the Liminal Body in the Erotic Art and Texts of the Old Babylonian Period, Assante. J, (2002)

Source: Sex, Magic, and the Liminal Body in the Erotic Art and Texts of the Old Babylonian Period, Assante. J, (2002)

If you would be interested in receiving notification upon the book’s completion and publication, please feel free to drop me a line using the contact form at deror.org

[5] “That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of one” – Hermes Trismegistus, The Emerald Tablet, translation by Jabir ibn Hayyan, (Holmyard 1923: 562.)

[17] Victor and Victoria Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003)

[18] Richard A. Werner, “To a new understanding of the function of the banking sector: the mechanism of productive credit creation and quantitative easing”, presentation to the Russian Academy of Sciences, round table “Anti-crisis fiscal policy of the state in the interests of economic development of Russia” (2015)

“I would like to continue with an examination of Time. From the moment we enter this life we are in the flow of it. We measure it and we mark it. But we cannot defy it. We cannot even speed it up or, slow it down. Or can we?”

– Eisenheim, The Illusionist

Time. The Fourth Dimension. The Universal Agent.

Imagine having the power to control Time. To manipulate Time. To become its master. Instead of feeling like a slave to Time, imagine what you might do, if you had the power to make Time work for you?

Men have always dreamed of possessing this power. In 15th century Italy, the discovery of mysterious ancient documents in Byzantium finally made it possible.

Today, we often speak of the value of “our time”. We speak of “spending time”, and “buying time”. But in truth, it is not “our” time at all.

Throughout the world, our Time is controlled, manipulated and directed, by ‘Masters of the Universe’. Men who are adepts in these ancient secrets, and have the power to make “our” Time work for them.

They are the bookkeepers. The men who keep score. And just as it is said of the game of golf that “a good scorer can always beat a good player”, so it is with the mystical, magical art of double-entry bookkeeping.

“For every debit there must be a credit, and for every credit there must be a debit” – Alas! How few consider that if this must be the case, the rule to go by, nothing is more easy than to make a set of books wear the appearance of correctness, which at the same time is full of errors, or of false entries, made on purpose to deceive!1

When the “Father of the Renaissance”, a humanist scholar, priest, and astrologer by the name of Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum from Greek into Latin, he could not have known that his labour would, in time, condemn most of humanity to slave labour for the Lords of Time.

Ficino’s lifelong patron was Cosimo de Medici, scion of the famous Italian merchant banking dynasty, and ruler of the Florentine Republic. His circle of friends included the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, and elite movers-and-shakers in the Western world. They now had in their hands the ancient secrets of Hermes Trismegistus, the “Thrice-Greatest”.

Starting at the Medici-sponsored Platonic Academy headed by Ficino, the rediscovered Hermetic secret knowledge would light the imaginative fires of the principal scholars, philosophers, and financiers of the Renaissance — also known as the “Hermetic Reformation”2. It would influence the mind of a monk, magician, mathematician, the Father of Accounting and the man who wrote the seminal book on double-entry bookkeeping, Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli, the “constant companion of Leonardo da Vinci”3. And in a grand syncretism with Neo-Platonism and Jewish Kabbalah, conjured up and expounded by fellow Renaissance men such as Pico della Mirandola (900 Theses), Johannes Reuchlin (De Arte Cabbalistica), and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres), it would spread throughout the western world, deeply embedded in commerce and banking, the arts and sciences, social philosophy, ethics and morality. It would change the course of human history (bold and italicised emphasis added):

Our modern urge to measure everything dates back to the late Middle Ages when a “radical change of perception” took place in which mathematics, Venetian bookkeeping, and Luca Pacioli played a key role. Historian Alfred W. Crosby explains this “radical change”:

‘In practical terms the new approach was simply this: reduce what you are trying to think about to the minimum required by its definition; visualise it on paper, or at least in your mind … and divide it, either in fact or in imagination, into equal quanta. Then you can measure it, that is, count the quanta.’

And once you can measure something, then you have a quantitative or numerical representation of your subject which you can manipulate and experiment with, no matter how great its errors or omissions. Such data can acquire an apparent independence from its human creators and, when fed into a twenty-first century computer model, an authority that appears irrefutable.4

Now, it is well worth our time to pause for a moment in our journey through past time, to consider the identity of Hermes Trismegistus. Today, he is considered to be a syncretism of the Greek god Hermes, and the Egyptian god Thoth. The Greeks considered Hermes to be the god of boundaries and transitions – in particular, the transition to the after-life. He was also the god of commerce, travel, the patron of thieves and orators, and a cunning trickster who outwits other gods for his own satisfaction. The Greeks equated him with the Egyptian god Thoth, who shared similar attributes. Thoth was seen by the Egyptians as the god who maintained the universe, the mediator in disputes between good and evil. He was the god of equilibrium, who unified or balanced the opposites. Importantly, in both of their respective cultures, Hermes and Thoth were the gods of writing, and magic.

The more astute reader, and in particular, the reader who has a grasp of the Duality Principle of double-entry bookkeeping — “for every credit there must be an equal debit” — may already be seeing a little light dawning in a corner of their mind.

Ficino and his influential friends at the Medicean court were to discover in the Corpus Hermeticum and in Kabbalah Ma’asit (“practical Kabbalah”) the secrets to controlling Time, the Universal Agent. At the heart of Hermetic teachings was the idea that man could influence or even control the forces of nature. To do so, one needed to master the “Three Parts of the Wisdom of the Whole Universe”. One of these parts, along with Astrology and Theurgy, was the magical art of Alchemy. Similarly, at the heart of Kabbalistic theurgy was the idea that man could magically invoke the creative or Life force — using esoteric knowledge of divine language and writing — for personal advantage in this world.

As with double-entry bookkeeping — and similarly, the dark art of keeping two sets of books — the magic of Alchemy involves a dual aspect or dual nature. In its esoteric (inner) doctrine, it is the work of spiritual purification; a transformation of common impure man, into pure and perfect Man. In its exoteric (outer) doctrine, it is the notion that man can transform common “impure” metals into pure gold, through the discovery and mastery of the “Universal Solvent”.

The magic of Hermeticism, with its emphasis on practical experimentation to discover and control the forces of nature, would have a powerful effect on the greatest scientific minds (such as Isaac Newton) for centuries to come. At the same time, its intrinsic get-rich-quick appeal would pose a constant attraction for over-indebted kings and princes — and for too-big-to-fail international bankers such as the Medici, whose compound interest-bearing loans the princes of Europe could not repay without borrowing even more.

The Emerald Tablet, a key text of Western Alchemy, in a 17th-century edition (Source: Wikipedia)

Some four hundred years later, a great revival of spiritualism and the magick arts swept over Europe during the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries. It is from this time, in the writings of adepts such as the famous occultists Aleister Crowley and Eliphas Lévi, that we can see clearly stated the most fundamental principles of Hermetic-Kabbalistic magick.

As we will see, they are precisely the same principles that form the basic rules of double-entry bookkeeping. Hermetic-Kabbalistic magick has been carried down from the Hermetic Reformation of the 15th century to our time, deeply embedded at the very core of all economic and social life; in commerce, economic theory, the fundamentals of capitalism, and banking.

The Hermetic-Kabbalistic magick principle of double perception is embedded at the core of the money system itself. In the very act of ex nihilo (“out of nothing”) creation of “our” money in the form of loans — using nothing more “real” than electronic double-entry bookkeeping — bankers enjoy the power of creator gods, employing “divine” magick principles in writing and language to harness the force of Time, transforming it into wealth for themselves.

“Money” created by bankers is simply the symbolic, written expression of this double perception. Each Dollar, Euro, or Pound created as a new loan magically appears (to the borrower) as both a debt (Liability) that must be repaid plus interest to the bank, and simultaneously, a credit (Asset) that the borrower can spend.

At the same time, to the bank that very same Dollar, Euro, or Pound magically appears as both an Asset (money that must be repaid by the borrower), and, a Liability too, because the bank must make it available to the borrower to spend.

This is the embodiment of the Kabbalistic concept of achduthashvaah (“Unity of Opposites”) — (bold emphasis added):

The coincidence of opposites that characterizes God, humanity and the world can be approximately understood by the simultaneous adoption of two points of view. As put by the founder of the Chabad movement, Schneur Zalman of Lyadi (1745-1813):

(Looking) upwards from below, as it appears to eyes of flesh, the tangible world seems to be Yesh and a thing, while spirituality, which is above, is an aspect of Ayin (nothingness). (But looking) downwards from above the world is an aspect of Ayin, and everything which is linked downwards and descends lower and lower is more and more Ayin and is considered as naught truly as nothing and null.5

When viewed from this Kabbalistic “higher” logic perspective, the mathematical expression “-1 = +1” is actually true; an object and its exact opposite are seen to be one and the same thing. A single unit of “money” is both credit and debit, liability and asset; it just depends on whose perspective it is seen from. But all things balance themselves out, when viewed from the hidden “All-Seeing Eye” perspective of the divine nothingness or Ein Sof. Each number is created from the same central number (“0”); the space “0” between -1 and +1 is exactly “1” from either side, and so each cancels out the other:

When it arose within Ein-sof (the Infinite) to weave Yesh (Something) from its Ayin (Nothing), Ein-sof performed an act of Tzimtzum, contracting and concealing itself from a point, thereby forming a central, metaphysical void. It is in this void that the Primordial Man, Adam Kadmon, and all the countless Worlds (Olamot) emerge.6

In the cryptic, mystical language of Hermetic-Kabbalistic magick, Aleister Crowley, the man once dubbed “The Most Wicked Man In The World”, explains the fundamentals of Magick In Theory And Practice (bold emphasis added):

…the object of any magick ceremony is to unite the Macrocosm and the Microcosm.

It is as in optics; the angles of incidence and reflection are equal. You must get your Macrocosm and Microcosm exactly balanced, vertically and horizontally, or the images will not coincide.

This equilibrium is affirmed by the magician in arranging the Temple. Nothing must be lop-sided. If you have anything in the North, you must put something equal and opposite to it in the South. The importance of this is so great, and the truth of it so obvious, that no one with the most mediocre capacity for magick can tolerate any unbalanced object for a moment. His instinct instantly revolts. …

…the arrangement of the weapons of the altar must be such that they “look” balanced…

…And however little he move to the right, let him balance it by an equivalent movement to the left; or if forwards, backwards; and let him correct each idea by implying the contradictory contained therein.

…let him show the basis of that Stability to be constant change, just as the stability of a molecule is secured by the momentum of the swift atoms contained in it.

In this way let every idea go forth as a triangle on the base of two opposites, making an apex transcending their contradiction in a higher harmony.

It is not safe to use any thought in Magick, unless that thought has been thus equilibrated and destroyed.7

There exists in Nature a force which is immeasurably more powerful than steam, and a single man, who is able to adapt and direct it, might change thereby the face of the whole world. This force was known to the ancients; it consists in a Universal Agent having equilibrium for its supreme law, while its direction is concerned immediately with the Great Arcanum of Transcendental Magic. … This agent… is precisely that which the adepts of the Middle Ages denominated the First Matter of the Great Work.8

Now the ancients, observing that equilibrium is the universal law in physics, and is consequent on the apparent opposition of two forces, argued from physical to metaphysical equilibrium, and maintained that in God, that is, in the First Living and Active Cause, there must be recognized two properties which are necessary to each other—stability and motion, necessity and liberty, rational order and volitional autonomy, justice and love, whence also severity and mercy. And these two attributes were personified, so to speak, by the kabalistic Jews under the names of GEBURAH and CHESED.9

Lévi says that to gain control over the “Great Magical Agent”, one must learn how to use the alchemical formula of opposites, “Solve et Coagula” (SOLVE, to dissolve, to project, to move; and COAGULA, to coagulate, to concentrate, to fix):

The Great Magical Agent, by us termed the Astral Light, …this occult, unique and indubitable force, is the key of all empire, the secret of all power. … To know how to make use of this Agent is to be the trustee of God’s own power; all real, effective Magic, all occult force is there, and its demonstration is the sole end of all genuine books of science. To have control over the Great Magical Agent there are two operations necessary — to concentrate and project, or, in other words, to fix and to move.10

Who can fail to see here, hidden in plain sight, the distilled essence, the Philosopher’s Stone, the whole alchemical formulation of double-entry bookkeeping?

The adept takes every single “common” transaction, and on entering it into his books, he first dissolves it (SOLVE) into a pair of opposites (debit entry and credit entry).

When it comes time to determine his Profits — and in turn, his total wealth or Capital — he “coagulates” (COAGULA) all of the entries in each of two columns (DR and CR) into a single number.

This then, is the apex of the triangle, the “higher harmony” of the “base of two opposites”, “transcending their contradiction”.

Eliphas Lévi tells us plainly that the purpose of the Great Work is to gain control over one’s future; that is to say, to gain control of Time itself:

The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will, assuring him… full power over the Universal Magical Agent.11

For the man who is greedy for gain, who sees financial wealth as the secret to a long and happy life, the possession of money is the means to attain “the full and entire conquest of his…future”. He can transform himself from a pauper into a prince — “the creation of man by himself” — and become a “self-made man”.

How so?

Money is the means of controlling Time. By lending his money at compound interest, the skillful adept increases his wealth, without risking his health through manual labour. His little pile of wealth (“capital”) grows inexorably, compounding into an ever larger pile over time. Just as in Eisenheim’s great illusion of the Orange Tree, the “seed” which was taken by dividing a single orange into two equal parts, grows at a speed which defies Time, “producing” even more golden fruit – fruit that the magician assures us is “quite real”.

This wondrous power is all thanks to the magic of what has been called “the greatest mathematical discovery of all time” and “the most powerful force in the universe” — compound interest.

But in a classic example of circular reasoning, the alchemical wizard’s “right” to charge compound interest is all thanks to a cunning rhetorical device (remember, Hermes was the god of oratory) — the so-called “Time value” of money.

Money, wrote [Luca Pacioli’s mentor, Leon Battista] Alberti in the 1430s, is “the root of all things”: “with money one can have a town house or a villa; and all the trades and craftsmen will toil like servants for the man who has money. He who has none goes without everything, and money is required for every purpose.” As historian Fernand Braudel argues, something new enters European consciousness in Alberti’s writing – along with his celebration of money went thriftiness and a concern with the value of time…12

This clever sophistry of the “Time value of money” has its origin in one of the greatest moral arguments of all time; whether the charging of interest on money (usury) is right, or wrong.

For over 1,000 years the Christian West officially prohibited the practice of charging interest on money (usury). But in the 15th century, the advocates for usury found themselves equipped with a new box of rhetorical and symbolic tricks with which to convince their audience. The syncretism of Neo-Platonic, Kabbalistic, and Hermetic philosophies in the Renaissance (“rebirth” in French) resulted in the resurrection of ancient Greco-Roman paganism. With it came an individualistic, “Me”-centred rather than “God”-centred worldview, with all-pervading emphasis on rationalism, and numerical calculation. In particular, the calculation of profit (bold emphasis added):

[German economist Werner Sombart] says that by enabling a numerical, monetary (and hence, in his view, “rational”) calculation of profit, double-entry bookkeeping provided the basis on which commerce could be seen as a process of acquisition: as an unending, systematic pursuit of profit.13

Like Sombart, [Max] Weber argues that double entry is significant because it makes possible an abstract measure of income and expenses – and therefore enables the calculation of profit, the key component of capitalistic business practice.14

The economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) also traces the development of capitalism back to double-entry bookkeeping. … Schumpeter says that capitalism adds a new edge to rationality by “exalting the monetary unit – not itself a creation of capitalism – into a unit of account. That is to say, capitalist practice turns the unit of account into a tool of rational cost-profit calculations, of which the towering monument is double-entry bookkeeping.” In his view, double entry’s “cost-profit calculus” drives capitalist enterprise – and then spreads throughout the whole culture: “And thus defined and quantified for the economic sector, this type of logic or attitude or method then starts upon its conqueror’s career subjugating – rationalizing – man’s tools and philosophies, his medical practice, his picture of the cosmos, his outlook on life, everything in fact including his concepts of beauty and justice and his spiritual ambitions.” For Schumpeter, capitalism “generates a formal spirit of critique where the good, the true and the beautiful no longer are honoured; only the useful remains – and that is determined solely by the critical spirit of the accountant’s cost-benefit calculation”.15

Double-entry bookkeeping would then, as now, serve the purpose not only of helping the merchant calculate his profits. It would enable the merchant to “prove” that his profit-making was legitimate; that is to say, in context of the times, that he had not been practicing usury in violation of the Church’s official prohibition (bold emphasis added):

[Luca] Pacioli advises merchants to incorporate explicit signs of Christianity into their books as a way of legitimising their profit-seeking activities. The use of double entry itself was like the Catholic confession: if a merchant confessed – or accounted for – all his worldly activities before God, then perhaps his sins would be absolved.16

This notion of ‘good’ bookkeeping was soon extended to the point that the use of double entry was seen to confer moral legitimacy on a merchant’s work. As Pacioli had, Hugh Oldcastle encouraged merchants to use their account books as a space in which to invoke God. He wrote in 1588: “it behoveth him [the merchant] first in all his workes and business to call to minde the name of God in all such writings, or in any other reckonings, that he shall beginne.” The first cashbook of the Bank of England, established in 1694, opens with ‘Laus Deo‘ – ‘Praise God’. As we saw with the merchants of Prato and with Pacioli, such appeals to God were a common feature of the earliest double-entry books and in some parts of Europe continued until the eighteenth century: through the exactitude of their earthly accounting, merchants hoped to gain divine approval in God’s heavenly accounts.17

If you are a businessman concerned with the morality of making a profit, then keeping the fullest possible set of accounts is a bit like confessing your sins.

Even if you are doing something morally suspect, at least you are making a clean breast of it.18

Indeed exactly because accountancy looks like a dry, value-free activity, it can be used as a kind of moral laundry.

When the Nazis stole the personal property of Europe’s Jews, Himmler insisted that all the looted property be meticulously accounted for.

By enforcing stringent accounting, he argued that “in carrying out this most difficult of tasks… we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, our character.” Theft was transformed into book- keeping.19

For an enormously successful usurer like Cosimo de Medici, who had the rare quality for a banker of suffering from a guilty conscience20, the matter of having one’s sins absolved had a profound importance. At that time, the only way to be absolved of the mortal sin of usury, and so be assured of a transition to Heaven in the after-life (hello Hermes/Thoth), was by making full restitution of all one’s ill-gotten gains. This meant, of course, that you could not pass on your wealth to your heirs; if you failed to make restitution before death, then in order to set you free from purgatory, your heirs would have to make restitution of all your usurious gains on your behalf:

Giovanni di Bicci de Medici, founder of the Medici Bank and Cosimo de Medici’s father … died intestate because in making out a will “he would have denounced himself as a usurer and might have caused considerable trouble for his heirs.” This practice had become a Medici family tradition, which Cosimo, Giovanni’s son would continue.21

Cosimo de Medici, Portrait by Bronzino (Source: Wikipedia)

The popularisation of double-entry bookkeeping in the Medici’s time offered another profoundly important benefit. It gave the merchant a way to “rationally” justify all of his “costs” — including the “costs” he perceives himself to have suffered, in extending (lending) “credit” to customers.

This would prove crucial in context of the historical argument on usury. Then, as now, those who argued in favour of usury have claimed that a man who lends his money to another has a moral right to be compensated for a wholly imaginary expense — the “opportunity cost” of his not being able to use the money he loaned out, to earn more money in some other way.

The “logic” of this argument for charging interest rests on an arrogant presumption — that the lender is certain of earning a “return” in that “other way”, and therefore, he must certainly be suffering a “cost” of lost “opportunity” to “earn”, if he lends his money out instead.

The unstated notion here, of course, is that, one way or another, the owner of money must always receive even more money. Gimme gimme gimme, more more moar!

It is on the foundation of this sophistry of an imaginary “opportunity cost” suffered by the money-lender — and “proven” to be real simply by writing it into his double-entry accounting books — that an even greater sophistry is built — that of the Time Value of Money.

In a 1991 paper on accounting and rhetoric, Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy Nelson Espeland argue that the symbolic language of double-entry bookkeeping is as significant as its technical capabilities … They argue that a double-entry account is not just a piece of neutral information, but also an “account” or story; that accounting is not merely a technical practice, but also a means of framing a set of business transactions with a rhetorical purpose.22

Accounting’s use of numbers gives it an air of scientific rectitude and certitude, and yet fundamental uncertainties lurk at its heart. Indeed, accounting is as subjective and partial as the art of storytelling, the other meaning of the word “account”.23

The illusion – for that is precisely what it is – that money possesses within itself an innate characteristic called “Time value”, is quite simply the greatest public deception of all time. When the arcane teachings of Hermes Trismegistus were infused and codified in el modo vinegia (“the Venetian method”) of double-entry bookkeeping in the 15th century, the twin magic arts of writing and sophistry were woven together to form the material of the magician’s cloak, and the curtain behind which the Wizards of Oz have hidden ever since.24

As Jakob Burckhardt, and following him, Frederich Nietzsche, said of the Italian Renaissance, it was a time of sophistic. The sophistic character of the Renaissance is apparent not simply from its rhetorical perspectives and practices, but in its use of the first sophists as well.25

In an essay published in 1985, the historian James Aho linked double-entry bookkeeping to the ancient art of rhetoric, the rules used to make persuasive arguments perfected by the Roman lawyer and orator Cicero (an art, incidentally, which Aristotle says sprang from a property dispute). According to this argument, medieval merchants used double-entry bookkeeping as a rhetorical tool of capitalist propaganda, to persuade their ‘audience’ that their business was honest, morally sound and its profit-making justified.

Why would bookkeeping need to persuade? Because, says Aho, it was used to defend these businesses against the Church’s ban on usury. The rhetoric of a well-kept ledger argued for the honesty of a business and the legitimacy of its profits, as this advice from 1683 makes clear: “If [the merchant] be fortunate and acquire much, [double entry] directs him the way to Imploy it to the best advantage, if he be unfortunate it satisfies the world of his just dealing, and is the fairest and best Apologie of his Innocence and honesty to the World.”26

Today, we are born into a world where the “logic” that money possesses a Time Value seems self-evident. The idea is so deeply embedded in our individual and collective consciousness, it has become part of our common language. Everyone knows that “Time is Money”.

This belief that money has an intrinsic Time Value is, however, nothing more than a spectacularly sly, self-serving example of self-interested swindlers successfully selling a self-referential, “self-creating” sophistry. For over 500 years, its purpose has been to persuade us all that money will certainly earn more money over time; and therefore, money possesses the innate power to earn more money over time; and therefore, the Lords of Time must have the right to charge interest for the use of money lent out, as compensation for their “lost opportunity” (ie, Time) to “earn” more money from their money’s innate power to earn more money.

This first half of the “Time Value of money” circular flow of illogical reasoning has come to be universally accepted, largely because so few pause to consider the unstated second half of the circle, which goes like this: and therefore, the Lords of Time must also have the right to pay interest (if they wish) to people who deposit money with them for “safe-keeping” (storage), as compensation for their “lost opportunity” to “earn” more money from money’s innate power to earn more money — err, say what now?! — (and whose deposits the Lords of Time can also lend out and charge interest for); and therefore, since it is now firmly established that money deposited with the Lords of Time will earn interest over time, this proves that money will certainly earn more money over time, and therefore money obviously possesses the innate power to earn more money over Time, etc etc,ad infinitum.

In its definition of the Time Value of Money, Investopedia unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag, highlighting this circular reasoning which lies (pun intended) at the dark heart of the grand mystical numberland of finance (bold and italicised emphasis added):

DEFINITION OF ‘TIME VALUE OF MONEY – TVM’

The idea that money available at the present time is worth more than the same amount in the future due to its potential earning capacity. This core principle of finance holds that, provided money can earn interest, any amount of money is worth more the sooner it is received.

Everyone knows that money deposited in a savings account will earn interest. Because of this universal fact, we would prefer to receive money today rather than the same amount in the future.27

Clearly then, the circular logic of the supposed Time Value of Money fails, if ever the “universal fact” that “money deposited in a savings account will earn interest” fails.

Like, err, now.

At this present time, so-called “ZIRP” (Zero Interest Rate Policy) and even “NIRP” (Negative Interest Rate Policy) is spreading all over the moribund economies of the Western world. We now receive zero interest on money deposited in a savings account. Not only that, in an increasing number of Western countries, the Lords of Time are now charging interest (ie, paying negative interest) on money deposited in a savings account. Yes, that’s right … if not now, then very soon, they will charge you interest for “holding” money on deposit in the “safe-keeping” of their bank.

Why are they doing this? As with so many magician’s tricks, the key to successfully pulling off the illusion, is movement. In the sideshow hustler’s game of Thimblerig or Three Shells and a Pea28, the faster the hustler moves his hands, the more difficult it is to see that he has moved or even pocketed the pea.

“The Conjurer,” painted by Hieronymus Bosch (between 1496 – 1520). The painting accurately displays a performer doing the cups and balls routine, which has been practiced since Egyptian times. The shell game does have some origins in this old trick. The real trick of this painting is the pickpocket who is working for the conjurer. The pickpocket is robbing the spectator who is bent over. (Source: Wikipedia)

In the great alchemical trick of Hermes the Thrice-Greatest and his Latter-Day Saints, this vital movement is called “Flow”, or the “Velocity of the Circulation of Money”. So long as the flow of money in the economy is fast enough, no one notices that the game is actually rigged. That is, no one notices that there is insufficient money in the system to pay interest.

This policy of zero (or even negative) interest rates on bank deposits, is all about trying to speed up the flow of money in the economy. The Lords of Time are hoping that this policy will encourage people to spend (“Flow”), not save (“Stock-pile”) money.

Why? Because the only way for the Lords of Time to keep on “earning” compound interest on the intergalactic levels of debt that they have lent to the world, is to make the “money” flow fast enough.

The real truth of the Money Illusion is this: If everyone had to settle their debts at the same time, there is always far more money owed, than there is money to pay with. The game only seems to work fairly and honestly if we only look under one shell at any time, and, if we believe the hustler’s claim that the missing pea really is just hiding under one of the other shells all the time.

In a recent article in Forbes titled “The Principal And Interest On Debt Myth”,29 a modern day mathematician and globally renowned academic economist set out to prove to the now-growing crowd of questioning (and in some cases, hostile) finger-pointers, that we should all just “Move along now, there’s nothing to see here”.

That is to say, he challenged the view that “because banks lend principal, but insist that principal and interest be paid by the debtor, the money supply has to grow continuously to make this possible”.

His proof?

A simple model of a “simplest possible financial system” … based on double-entry bookkeeping:

Alas, the accounting fraud-riddled history of double-entry bookkeeping ever since its Western popularisation by Fra Luca Pacioli (and more importantly, by his powerful patrons in the world of money-lending), strongly suggests that a reliance on the “logic” of double entry to “prove” anything with regard to banking, money, debt, and compounding interest, is tantamount to using the casino’s own roulette wheel in an attempt to “prove” that the game of roulette is not rigged in favour of the house.

Or, to return to our shell game analogy, it is tantamount to relying on a sideshow hustler’s own sleight of hand skills to “prove” that the pea you couldn’t see really was under one of those three shells all the time.

It all works fine (for the hustler), whilst ever the “flow” of the hustler’s hands is fast enough to fool the common man. But if the flow is slowed – in economic terms, by a growing “loss of confidence” in the game, resulting in too many people saving or “hoarding” money (Stability) rather than spending it (Movement) — suddenly the hustle begins to be exposed. At a slower rate of “flow”, it becomes much more easy to see that the hustler has been pocketing the pea all along.

Happily, the economist writing in Forbes did admit that the money-lenders’ money-shuffling game only works “so long as those flows are large enough”:

He also admitted that his simple model does not reflect the real world, which “is far more complicated”:

He also admitted that it is possible to enter different values for the limited set of parameters he chose for his simple model, that would make his conclusion (that interest can be paid without increasing the money supply) “untenable”:

But arguably his most important admission of all was not included in his Forbes article. Rather, it is on his Twitter account that we find his admission, that it is mathematically impossible for everyone to pay their debts at the same time:

In his zeal to disprove the claims of a growing crowd of questioning onlookers who are pointing out that the monetary alchemists’ shell game is rigged, the good professor has fallen afoul of the error of oversimplification. A simple double-entry bookkeeping model, of a “simplest possible financial system”, having a limited set of parameters, that obviously does not include all the parameters of the real world’s financial system, but that does include a number of invalid assumptions (eg, the notion that banks are “consumers”, who spend all their earnings back into the “flow” of the national economy); a model that does not reflect the real world “which is far more complicated”, is a model that is quite obviously too simple, and does not prove (or disprove) anything at all.

Jane Gleeson-White, author of Double Entry: How The Merchants of Venice Shaped Modern Finance, relates an interesting and relevant anecdote regarding Fra Luca Pacioli, the acclaimed father of accounting. On 11 August 1508, Pacioli gave an introductory public lecture at the church of San Bartolomeo near the Rialto Bridge in Venice (bold emphasis added):

Some five hundred people came to hear the celebrated mathematician speak … The famous Venetian printer Aldus Manutius was there and may have brought along Erasmus, who was staying with him near the Rialto while supervising the printing of his translation of Euripedes and a collection of ancient proverbs.

Intriguingly, after leaving Italy in 1509 Erasmus wrote his famous satire, In Praise of Folly, in which he mocks scientists who use maths to bamboozle their audience. His description of these boffins rather accurately parodies the methods used by Luca Pacioli in his talk on Euclid: “When they especially disdain the vulgar crowd is when they bring out their triangles, quadrangles, circles, and mathematical pictures of the sort, lay one upon the other, intertwine them into a maze, then deploy some letters as if in line of battle, and presently do it over in reverse order – and all to involve the uninitiated in darkness.” In his book, Erasmus set out to deflate the pretensions of anyone who claimed special knowledge or importance, whether they were philosophers, merchants or clerics.30

In his Praise of Folly .. he calls Mercury the inventor of tricks or of conjuring (“Quos nos ludos exhibet furtis ac praestigiis Hermes?”—“What entertainments does Hermes show us, with his tricks and sleight-of-hand?”)31

Bernard Lietaer is a former central banker, fund manager, and co-designer of the European Currency Unit (precursor to the Euro), who was named “the world’s top currency trader” by Businessweek in 1992. Today, Lietaer is a currency system reformer with almost 40 years active experience in the field. In Rethinking Money, he uses the brilliant analogy of the game of musical chairs, to help explain how “our” alchemical money system really works.

His analogy helps to illuminate this fundamental point – that it is only when the music (money “flow”) slows (“economic slowdown”) or stops (“credit crunch”), and people get nervous (“economic con-fidence”) and start looking for a chair to sit on, that we discover there never was enough chairs (“money”) for everyone:

Essentially, to pay back interest on a loan requires using someone else’s principal. In other words, not creating the money to pay interest is the device used to generate the scarcity necessary for a bank-debt monetary system to function. It forces people to compete with each other for money that was never created, and it penalizes them with bankruptcy should they not succeed. When a bank checks a customer’s creditworthiness, it is really verifying his or her ability to compete successfully against the other players – that is to say, assessing the customer’s ability to extract from others the money that is required to reimburse the interest payment. One is obliged in the current monetary system to incur debt and compete with others in order to perform exchanges and pay the resulting interest to the banks and lenders.32

Although new loans are being created, the interest on the principal is not. Nowhere in the system is this additional money created. This gives rise to scarcity, which, in turn, creates competition to acquire the extra money to cover the loans’ interest. This magic, where one person’s loan becomes another’s deposit, and whereby when you pay interest you are using someone else’s principal, is really monetary alchemy. This monetary alchemy is one of the esoteric secrets of the monetary system.33

A key point to keep in mind is that this entire money-creation process hinges on loans. If all debts were repaid, money would simply disappear, because the entire process of money creation would reverse itself. Reimbursing all loans would automatically use up all the deposits.34

When a banker checks a customer’s credit score, it is to assess how successful or aggressive that individual or business will be in contending with others to obtain funds that are not created in sufficiency to pay back the interest on the loan.35

In a manner of speaking, it’s like a game of musical chairs in that there are never enough seats for everyone. Someone will end up getting squeezed out. There isn’t enough money to pay the interest on all the loans, just like the missing chair. Both are highly competitive games. In the money game, however, the stakes are elevated, as it means grappling with certain poverty or, worse still, having to declare bankruptcy.36

The real brilliance of Lietaer’s musical chairs analogy is that it helps the “common” man and woman to easily visualise, and understand, the alchemists’ critical need for monetary “motion” as opposed to “stability”, in order to conjure an apparent economic “equilibrium” of “constant change” (ie, constant economic “growth”) moving through time. It is, we now see, an illusory “equilibrium”, built on the ancient magic of sophistry and numbers, and contrived to “produce” compound “yields” for the Wizards of Oz hiding behind the curtain:

…let him show the basis of that Stability to be constant change, just as the stability of a molecule is secured by the momentum of the swift atoms contained in it.

In this way let every idea go forth as a triangle on the base of two opposites, making an apex transcending their contradiction in a higher harmony.

It is not safe to use any thought in Magick, unless that thought has been thus equilibrated and destroyed.37

Unlike these present-day Lords of Time and their legions of high priests all preaching the obscure doctrines of Hermetic-Kabbalistic economic theology, Lietaer is speaking an everyday, “common” language — of “common” imagery and symbols — that we can easily understand. Most important to notice though, is that his clear and simple language is a result of his motivation. He seeks not to obfuscate but to elucidate.

In a telling passage of John Maynard Keynes: Vol 2 The Economist As Saviour 1920-1937, Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky informs us that (bold and italicised emphasis added):

In Keynes’s view capitalism’s driving force is a vice which he called “love of money” … in the General Theory “the propensity to hoard” or “liquidity preference” plays a vital part in the mechanics of an economy’s rundown, once something has happened to make investment less attractive. And this links up with Keynes’s sense that, at some level too deep to be captured by mathematics, “love of money” as an end, not a means, is at the root of the world’s economic problem.38

Nearly two thousand years earlier, Jesus of Nazareth pointed to the same thing, in debunking the money-lenders’ illusion (delusion) that “‘Time’ (‘God’) is ‘Money'”:

No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon [money].39

*******

UPDATE 2/2/2016

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in them both, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it (…) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality.”

— George Orwell, defining “doublethink” in his book 1984

“Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures. Society is now required not only to recognise everyone’s right to the freedom of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite in meaning. This destruction of traditional values from above not only leads to negative consequences for society, but is also essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority, which does not accept the changes occurring or the proposed revision of values.”